Rich Mullins Quotes

Never forget what Jesus did for you. Never take lightly what it cost Him. And never assume that if it cost Him His very life, that it won't also cost you yours.

Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.

So go out and live real good and I promise you'll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you're dead, you'll be rotted away anyway. It's not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn't live.

We were given the Scriptures to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing.

I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity, but because there were people willing to be nuts and bolts.

It never fails. God will put people in your path that irritate you, especially if you're prone to be irritated.

I had a professor one time... He said, 'Class, you will forget almost everything I will teach you in here, so please remember this: that God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and He has been speaking through asses ever since. So, if God should choose to speak through you, you need not think too highly of yourself. And, if on meeting someone, right away you recognize what they are, listen to them anyway'.

A faith that moves mountains is a faith that expands horizons, it does not bring us into a smaller world full of easy answers, but into a larger one where there is room for wonder.

I grew up hearing everyone tell me 'God loves you'. I would say big deal, God loves everybody. That don't make me special! That just proves that God ain't got no taste. And, I don't think He does. Thank God! Because He takes the junk of our lives and makes the most beautiful art.

Bear in mind, children, that they listen to you because you are kids—not because you are right. That's how our Father listens to us.

I think, writing-wise, I am probably more of a quilter than a weaver because I just get a little scrap here and a little scrap there and sew them together.

I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am

The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart -- it is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that benefits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice -- it does not so much nibble at our shoe leather as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from the bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our small-minded questions, but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask.

We do not find happiness by being assertive. We don't find happiness by running over people because we see what we want and they are in the way of that happiness so we either abandon them or we smash them. The Scriptures don't teach us to be assertive. The Scriptures teach us—and this is remarkable—the Scriptures teach us to be submissive. This is not a popular idea.

I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ's birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It's nice to find theological justification for your quirks.

The longer I live, the more I have the feeling like God looks down, like when you've just bitten into a vanilla ice cream cone, you just get the feeling God's going, 'Yes! He enjoys it, and I made his taste buds and I made vanilla and he's putting it together and he's experiencing what I created him to experience.

Friendship is not a remedy for loneliness. Loneliness is part of our experience, and if we are looking for relief from loneliness in friendship, we are only going to frustrate the friendship. Friendship, camaraderie, intimacy, all those things, and loneliness lived together in the same experience.

I would like to encourage you to stop thinking of what you're doing as ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it all messed up or not; whether you flush your own toilet or not. Your ministry is the way that you love people. And you love people when you write something that is encouraging to them, something challenging. You love people when you call your wife and say, 'I'm going to be late for dinner,' instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife sometime, because you know she's really tired. Loving people - being respectful toward them - is much more important than writing or doing music.

God did not give Joseph any special information about how to get from being the son of a nomad in Palestine to being Pharaoh's right hand man in Egypt. What He did give Joseph were eleven jealous brothers, the attention of a very loose and vengeful woman, the ability to do the service of interpreting dreams and managing other people's affairs and the grace to do that faithfully wherever he was.

There's a difference, you know, between faith and playing make-believe. One will make you grow. The other one will make you sleep.

Look at us all -- we are all of us lost and in all of our different ways of pretending, we all fool ourselves into the very same hell. Look at the cross -- we are all of us loved and one God meets us all at the point of our common need and brings to all of us -- all who will let Him -- salvation.

Well, I wrote that song for the village, but I wrote this one for the sky.

It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church...you should read the Scriptures.

Christianity doesn't answer all my questions or make me comfortable and happy. What it does do is give me a context for living.

I look back over the events of my life and see the hands that carried Moses to his grave lifting me out of mine. In remembering I go back to these places where God met me and I meet him again and I lay my head on his breast, and he shows me the land beyond the Jordan and I suck into my lungs the fragrance of his breath, the power of his presence.

I have attended church regularly since I was less than a week old. I've listened to sermons about virtue, sermons against vice. I have heard about money, time management, tithing, abstinence, and generosity. I've listened to thousands of sermons. But I could count on one hand the number of sermons that were a simple proclamation of the gospel of Christ.

I hope that I would leave a legacy of joy. A legacy of real compassion. Because I think there is great joy in real compassion. I don’t think that you can know joy apart from caring deeply about people – caring enough about people that you actually do something.

We all want to go there something awful, but to stand there takes some grace.

Is that "great cloud of witnesses" watching my way so as to judge or is it informing my way so that I may walk it? Do they hide the light so that I cannot see it or do they filter it so that its blaze will not blind me? Can a man see God face to face and live? Can I not see an eclipse better through a pinhole in a paper than without it? We can't so much see light as we can see things because of it. So I do not meet God in a vacuum -- I meet Him in the world He has provided for me to meet Him in -- in a world of events and of places, of history (time and space), in a world of lives of people and their records of their encounters. I meet God in this world -- in the world of these things... ...and this is the world as best as I can remember it.

Forged in the fires of human passion, choking on the fumes of human rage, with these out hells and our heavens, so few inches apart, we must be awfully small, and not as strong as we think we are.

Love one another, forgive one another, work as unto God, let the peace of Christ reign in your hearts. Make it your ambition to lead quiet lives. Obey. Greet one another with a holy kiss. No one will argue with that.

Pulpits today are full of preachers telling one-legged people to jump higher and run faster. Musician Rich Mullins once wrote, “I have attended church regularly since I was less than a week old. I’ve listened to sermons about virtue, sermons against vice. I have heard about money, time management, tithing, abstinence, and generosity. I’ve listened to thousands of sermons. But I could count on one hand the number [of sermons] that were a simple proclamation of the Gospel of Christ.”4

I am thinking now of old Moses sitting on a mountain—sitting with God—looking across the Jordan into the Promised Land. I am thinking of the lump in his throat, that weary ache in his heart, that nearly bitter longing sweetened by the company of God... And then God—the great eternal God—takes Moses' thin-worn, thread-bare little body into His hands—hands into whose hollows you could pour the oceans of the world, hands whose breadth marked off the heavens—and with these enormous and enormously gentle hands, God folds Moses' pale lifeless arms across his chest for burial. I don't know if God wept at Moses' funeral. I don't know if He cried when He killed the first of His creatures to take its skins to clothe this man's earliest ancestors. I don't know who will bury me— ...Of God, on whose breast old Moses lays his head like John the Beloved would lay his on the Christ's. And God sits there quietly with Moses—for Moses—and lets His little man cry out his last moments of life. But I look back over the events of my life and see the hands that carried Moses to his grave lifting me out of mine. In remembering I go back to these places where God met me and I meet Him again and I lay my head on His breast, and He shows me the land beyond the Jordan and I suck into my lungs the fragrance of His breath, the power of His presence.

Joshua made the sun stand still in the sky, but I can't keep these thoughts of You from passing by.

Wealth can’t be defined in terms of what we have, but only in terms of how free we are to give and take”.

It seems that I always am and always have been an outsider. I've never really fit in. I was always too religious for my rowdy friends—they thought I was unbelievably hung up—and too rowdy for my religious friends—they were always praying for me.

Faith is a matter of the will as much as it is of the intellect. I wanted to believe in Jesus. My friend wanted to believe in himself. In spite of how convincing my reason was, my reason was not compelling.

God loves us not because we are lovable, but because He is love.

It took the hand of God almighty To part the waters and the sea But it only takes one little lie To separate you and me We are not as strong as we think we are.

We walk by faith and not by sight – not because we are blind, but because faith gives us the courage to face or fears and puts those fears in a context that makes them less frightful. We walk by faith and not by sight because there are places to go that cannot be seen and the scope of our vision is too small for our strides. Faith is not a denial of facts – it is a broadening of focus. It does not deny the hardness of guitar strings, it plucks them into a sweetness of sound

Rich Mullins, one of my favorite writers and musicians, said that when he was a kid he’d walk down the church aisle and be “born again again” or “rededicate” his life to Christ every year at camp. In college he’d do it about every six months, then quarterly; by the time he was in his forties it was “about four times a day.”3 Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ.

I am a Christian because I have seen the love of God lived out in the lives of people who know Him. The Word has become flesh and I have encountered God in the people who have manifested (in many “unreasonable” ways) His Presence; a Presence that is more than convincing—it is a Presence that is compelling. I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity to me, but because there were people who were willing to be nuts and bolts, who through their explanation of it, held it together so that I could experience it and be compelled by it to obey.

And while reason may be found within His love, no reason would be able to contain his love. […] It is possible that the evidence of His divinity lies in that love – that in light of love, miracles seem sort of unremarkable. If God can love me, the rest will follow.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. — C. S. Lewis

That is why one of Rich's most powerful songs, and one he enjoyed singing in concert more than any other, is “Greed.

he had let go of the need to earn God's love,

If I loved my Master like my dog loves his, I would be more saintly than John the Divine…more radical than John the Baptizer…more deeply devoted than St. John of the Cross. My

Earth's crammed with heaven; And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. — Elizabeth Baccett Browning

The disciples finally begin to get a grasp that maybe God can become flesh and dwell among us, maybe God can be a man, and then they come back and not only is God a man, but He's acting like an idiot! He's hanging out with a bunch of kids. He's blessing them, you know. And you think, How do you bless children? Well, the best way I know is that you pick them up and you just throw them as high as you can, and you catch them right before they splatter. You get down on all fours and you run around the room and you let them ride you and you buck them off. … You put your mouth against their bellies and you make funny noises. Here's Jesus probably doing all this business. His disciples were humiliated! And they said, “You should not be making such a fool of Yourself!” And Jesus says, “Here, look, look, fellas. I'll call the shots here. I may be dumb, but I am God. And I'll tell you what else, if you wanna come into My kingdom, you'll come in like one of these or you won't come in at all.

I think that part of being human is being alone. And being lonely. I think one of the stresses on a lot of our friendships is that we require the people we love to take away that loneliness. And they really can't. And so, when we still feel lonely, even in the company of people we love, we become angry with them because they don't do what we think they're supposed to. Which is really something that they can't do for us.5

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. — Mark Twain

What would it be like to be Christ? I mean, did He ever play ball? Did He ever knock a window out of somebody's house and did He ever have to explain to His dad that He had to borrow twelve dollars?

If your life is motivated by your ambition to leave a legacy, what you’ll probably leave as legacy is ambition. — Rich Mullins

one hidden act of kindness is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of Christians so preoccupied with cultivating their prayer lives that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the barrio.

When I die, they're going to have to bury me because if they don't, I'll stink up the place.

I've failed many times to avoid those kinds of temptations. But that's not what the devil was really interested in. What he was trying to do is make me feel apart from God. Now I know that what Satan would like most to take from us is our true knowledge of who we are—which is children of God.5

13. Read poetry. Study poetry. Know at least something about what an iamb and a trochee and a spondee are. Words matter, phrasing matters, lines matter. Don’t assume that poetry is just for snobs and grad students, because it isn’t. Part of the delight of good songwriting is when it unfolds itself to you over the course of many listens, like when I realized after listening to and performing Rich Mullins’s “The Color Green” many times, I discovered a subtle rhyme pattern buried in the lyrics, or when an image in verse two foreshadows another one in verse three.

Sometimes we don’t know where God is going to lead us; but God already knows. It’s not our job to worry about that. It’s just our job to follow.

The same moon is still up there. The same stars that Abraham saw... And I know that the same God who put them there and made them shine, He’s still there too... And I know that God does not lie. ...We don’t need to judge God’s way of doing stuff. It gets done.

While we strive to be like God, we’re pretty apt to fail, and we let ourselves down. I think more so than [we let God down]. God knows that we are dust, and I don’t think He’s too uptight about it.

On the “large market trap”: It's easy to become beguiled by large and potentially attractive markets, as Tuninvest was. Nespresso, too, in its early days, eyeing the 70 percent of the coffee market served by roasted and ground coffee that it did not sell. “If I can only sell my widget to 1 percent of the people in China, I'll be rich,” some say. Market size is important, of course, as there's more room in large markets for multiple companies to be successful. But, as a starting point, I'll take a very narrow target market having a compelling problem that I can solve, and solve better than anyone else. My advice: think narrow at the outset. Moving the needle can come later, once progress is in hand.

Before we had stifled the cross into a symbol, before we had softened grace into a sentiment, before we had systematized the power and mystery of God's greatest revelation of Himself into a set of dogmas, we were the children that we must become again.

And if I weep Let it be As a man Who is longing for His home.

[The Bible] says a lot of things in there! Proof-texting is a very, very dangerous thing. I think if we were given the scriptures it was not so that we could prove that we are right about everything. If we were given the scriptures it was to humble us into realizing that God is right and the rest of us are just guessing.

One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God. — Frederick Buechner

According to Piketty, if r remains at its historical rate of about 5 percent, then all the negative developments related to the inequality from the 19th century will be repeated. These will include disrespect for working people; worshiping of people who do not work and enjoy leisurely life by living at the expense of other people’s labor; political acts that disdain equal opportunity and deny democracy; and opportunities for the rich to buy politicians. What logical conclusion can be made from Piketty’s research? If this development continues, then by the end of the 21st century, the world’s wealth may become the property of a few enormously rich individuals and institutions. Then, 99.9 percent of humans will end up working for a small number of oligarchs, who will accumulate their wealth by virtue of heredity instead of earning it based on merit.

As Warren Buffett once said, “Sure there is class war, and it is my class, the rich, who are making it and we are winning.

You should not let a single person in the world, whatever sin that person may have committed, come before your eyes and depart without having found mercy with you. And should that person not ask for mercy from you, then you must ask it of him. And were that person to come to you a thousand times, continue to love them so as to lead them back to the right path. Always have compassion, for all of us have sinned. —Saint Francis of Assisi

The line in this song that slayed me the first time I heard it, and slays me every time I hear it, is ‘I cannot explain the way that You came to love me, except to say that nothing is beyond You.